Art: Serra Sculptures At Pace and Castelli

By JOHN RUSSELL

Published: October 9, 1987

RICHARD SERRA as a sculptor can be all delicacy, all nuance, all finesse. Few things now on view in New York are as subtle as his ''Even Level'' at the Pace Gallery. It is built with two identical beams of hot rolled steel. They measure 72 inches by 8 by 4. One of them sticks out from the wall at an angle of 90 degrees and a height of 6 feet, give or take a few inches. It is, as the title suggests, perfectly level. It is suppported (or perhaps not quite supported: Mr. Serra leaves that for us to figure out) by an identical-size batten of steel that stands at a slightly irregular angle both to the wall and to the horizontal beam.

What might have been a straightforward T is, in other words, a marginally irregular form that gives us a momentary tremor. A closed situation - our old, straightforward, ever-reliable T - has become an open situation. As we study the tiny, darting, elegant wedge of light that marks that strange and unexpected near-joining, we feel in our own bodies a cognate and fleeting dislocation.

If this column does not stand quite straight, and thereby calls in question a sense of weight and security that goes back to the temples of Greece and Egypt, what about our own heads, necks, shoulders, hips, knees, ankles, feet? We live by their uprightness, and as we get older, we grieve for their decline. In ''Even Level,'' something that we have always taken for granted is called in question, and questioned in terms of wit.

Among the other ''wall props'' in the Pace Gallery show there is one called ''Keystone'' that is built with three identical steel plates, each 60 inches square and 3 inches thick. Like most of Mr. Serra's sculptures, it seems to be virtually impossible to photograph. Scale, texture, small but fundamental departures from flatness - all prove to be shy of the camera.

''Keystone'' is predicated, for instance, on the slight forward tilt of the two lower elements and the huge flat upward thrust of the top one. Noting that tilt, we may wish to read the piece as a schematic torso - navel to upper thigh - of the kind that Brancusi brought to perfection. But this is Brancusi plus pity and terror. As we calculate the possible height of the entire figure, we feel ourselves in the presence of a vast definitive fragment that doubles as a complete work of art. Gone, too, are the plinths of yesteryear. Mr. Serra uses the floorboards in such a way that we almost believe that the piece is free to move around and might step forward to claim us as its kin.

Altogether, the sculptures at Pace are among the finest of our time. At the end on the right as we come into the gallery there is one that seems to squat between two walls as the Minotaur must have squatted in its Cretan cave at the approach of a victim. Thus lodged in a tight space, the piece has an intimacy, a complicity, a suggestion of fatal involvement that draw us, unresisting, toward it.

Downtown, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, a Serra exhibition consists of three very large sculptures. One of them - called, in Mr. Serra's own quotes, '' 'My Curves Are Not Mad' '' - is built with two identical curved plates, each 14 feet high and close on 15 feet wide, that pair up like well-mated lovers and dare us to get in between them.

A private statement on a public scale, it raises once again the problem that Mr. Serra's very large pieces need exact and thoughtful handling if they are to make their full effect. Given that handling, Mr. Serra can look as much at home in a garden across the water from Hamlet's castle in Denmark, or in a memorably ugly side street in rebuilt Kassel, West Germany, as he does in the vaulted cloister of the Cathedral of Brou. Without it, they can look disinherited, like monumental answers to a question that nobody has yet asked. That problem is worth tackling, because Richard Serra in 1987 is a major sculptor at the top of his form.

Still in her late 20's, Rebecca Purdum made a paradoxically strong impression last year with paintings that were about evanescence, or perhaps about nonbeing. They worked upon us, but what exactly was it that worked so strongly? Was it an echo of J. M. W. Turner's way with tinted steam clouds? Had Mark Rothko anything to do with it? Or were they portraits of meditation, and very like?

Her second show comes with a quotation from the theologian Martin Buber that does something to straighten this out. Buber spoke of a form that he could neither experience nor describe, but only actualize: ''Tested for its objectivity, the form is not 'there' at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.''

In the context of a Purdum painting, we may take this either as literal truth or as a wonderfully stylish verbal structure. Either way, it does seem to bear directly upon the new paintings. As before, they are a matter of mist and wraith, most eloquently evoked but stopping well short of definition. Huge perspectives beckon, only to vanish. Forest rides ask us in, only to rescind the invitation. Caverns lurk - or do they? Great sheets of water stand at our feet, only to disappear underground. This is true visionary art, and most tellingly wrought. 'In Memory Of Xavier Four cade' Xavier Fourcade Gallery 36 East 75th Street Through Oct. 17